Many financial institutions that accept deposits and that are federally insured are required to regularly report detailed financial information to a variety of federal and state regulatory agencies. Examples of depository financial institutions include banks, thrifts and credit unions. However, many non-depository financial institutions, such as mortgage banks, are not federally insured and/or regulated and do not have to provide the same detailed financial information to either federal or state regulatory agencies.
The United States Congress passed federal laws that create some corporations with government agency status and chartered these corporations to perform certain tasks, such as providing liquidity to the secondary mortgage market and promoting homeownership among low and moderate income families. Non-depository institutions regularly work with these federally chartered corporations. To carry out their charters, federally chartered corporations also require access to detailed financial information from all institutions choosing to do business with them. Therefore, all non-depository institutions doing business with federally chartered corporations provide similar detailed information to these corporations as the information federally insured institutions provide to federal and state regulatory agencies.
Non-depository institutions previously reported detailed financial information to federally chartered corporations by filling out “hard” or paper forms. In order to fill out the paper forms, each non-depository institution generally collected the required information from multiple sources and transcribed the information onto the paper forms. Upon receiving the paper forms, each federally chartered corporation entered the information into databases and other sources for internal uses. The use of paper forms required substantial time and costs from both the provider and the receiver of the financial information.
To reduce the time and costs associated with reporting financial information through paper forms, each federally chartered corporation now sends out the appropriate forms to each non-depository institution on electronic storage means, such as floppy diskettes or compact disks. The non-depository institution still obtains the information from multiple sources, such as databases, enters the detailed financial information in the forms, and returns the storage means to the federal chartered institution. The federally chartered corporation retrieves the information from each storage means and stores the information in internal databases for further processing. While providing financial information through electronic storage means reduces the costs associated with paper forms to the provider and receiver of the financial information, this method is still inefficient. For example, there are costs associated with mailing the diskettes and retrieving and storing information from and to each storage means. Storage means also may be lost or stolen during transmission to and from the receiver and/or sender.
Moreover, non-depository institutions are highly competitive with each other. Therefore, these institutions are very interested in similarly situated non-depository institutions' (peers) performances. As such, non-depository institutions typically base employees' compensation on how they perceive similarly situated non-depository institutions' performances. Nevertheless, there is currently no objective comparison of similarly situated non-depository institutions. Therefore, there is no means for a non-depository institutions to actually determine how peer institutions are actually performing.
What is needed, therefore, is an efficient system and method for obtaining detailed financial information from non-depository institutions and for providing information about similarly situated non-depository institutions' performances without disclosing specific financial information provided by one or more non-depository institutions.